A delivery aggregation service

29 November 2018

Full disclosure: I know very little about the food delivery space so this is more speculative than anything rooted in reality.

Given how many companies are doing food delivery it seems there should be a single delivery aggregation service that combines all of them to act as the perfect dispatcher for drivers. If I’m delivering food on behalf of Uber Eats, DoorDash, Postmates, Grubhub, and the countless others I missed it would make sense for me to be able to pick up from as many nearby restaurants as possible and then deliver to as many colocated locations as possible. The ideal situation would be that I’m able to pick up all my deliveries from a single restaurant and then deliver them all to the same floor of an apartment building.

My understanding is that the dispatch is managed by the food delivery companies and not the restaurant which makes this impossible. Instead, I have to follow each company’s dispatching service which prevents me from potentially getting more deliveries on the same route. This would be slightly better if the restaurant were responsible for the delivery since they would be able to batch but unfortunately they would then also be responsible for keeping drivers busy at all times. The ideal situation would be to have the driver have the ultimate responsibility which would incentivize them to integrate into every service in order to tap into as many aligned routes as possible. This is similar to the Uber vs Lyft situation - they both offer enough incentives to keep drivers sticky but without the incentives drivers would be better off playing both sides and doing what’s best at any single time.